The wily metaphor
Site I happened across via Zeldman today, What Do I Know. Good site. Nice design (of course, coming from Zeldman). Interesting bit (linked above) on Trading Places. What I found interesting was this:
The show is intriguing on two levels. One, watching rooms be turned completely upside down for a paltry thousand bucks. Two, the schism between the sophisticated, artsy interior designers and their clients with Walmart design sense. Things can go well, or get ugly. And last night, they got ugly.
He then goes on to recount how the designer went wild, completely ignored the needs of the occupants, and created the equivalent of a Hollywood mansion screening room for these poor schlubs, who had only a paltry 17" TV to put in it.
Pretty good metaphor for a lot of what passes for design (read Photoshop idolatry, Flash-worship, and typography-obsession) on the web. Users, in software as much as web design, should be going "oooh" over the information, not the designer's technical sleight-of-hand. No opaque technique, transparency of tools should be the motto.